Location-based applications (LBAs) running on smartphones offer features that leverage the user's current or past physical geolocation (e.g., represented as latitude, longitude coordinates) to provide some enhanced service. While such capabilities are compelling, they are limited in practice due to the high rate of energy consumption from the geolocation fix acquisition process, either through global positioning system (GPS) or trilateration using Wi-Fi or cellular towers.
Continuous use of a GPS sensor can deplete a smartphone's battery within a short time period (e.g., one day). Further, if the periodicity of the fixes has a long inter-acquisition time or if it is irregularly scheduled to reduce power consumption, then successive acquisitions may miss an important geolocation event.